This blog was originally intended to be the home for my dark age Britain project but on completion I found blogging such a great inspiration to complete stuff, that I just naturally continued. Please note that as a result of persistent spamming any comments are moderated . Sorry

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Tuesday, 7 January 2014

Romano-Britsh infantry

I guess the blog is chronologically wrong in terms of the order of unit production. I actually started from the Romano-Brits and went on from there. One of the things I really enjoyed when surfing other gamers Arthurian modelling efforts were those beautiful shield designs from little Big men Studios. (LBM) They seemed particularly stunning to me because I'm basically shit at painting shields. The problem was however that I was using kallistra figures as a base and these were around 12mm in scale and LBM don't make any decals suitable for them. So first thing I did was to buy a number of Arthurian examples from their 15mm ranges in the hope that I could cut them about and make them fit. The experiment began..

First efforts:-

The first units I decided to use the figures "straight from the box". Not bad but The spears had to go and I had real difficulty cutting the shield designs down to fit the Kallistra model shields.

Stage two:-

After a little thought I decided to be a little drastic with the figures and make brass wire spears and in some cases replace a few shields to make the LBM decals more viable at this scale.

The first unit off the blocks was the leader and companions. These were quite a lot better IMO. I wasn't too happy with some of the shields but it was an improvement on the first batch. I decided to go from here and make a couple of Noble units using the same methods.

These involved a great deal more cutting and chopping and although looking reasonable there was still a lot I was unhappy with. Some of the shields for example were way too big.

During production I ordered and tried out a few other decal sheets with the thought that there can be some variations in figure manufacturers definition of 15mm ie large and small scale 15mm

I had almost finished these two bases when I received a fresh batch of decals from LBM one of which was art(SL)1 made for splintered light miniatures. These were almost perfect. The round shield designs could be used as they came and the oval shields could be made to fit by trimming off about 0.5 mm all round maybe a little more from the top and bottom. With that in mind I moved on to the next ordinary warbands.

Stage 3:-

There was by now a further complication in that I wanted more figure variety. As a result I introduced a couple more complications. I would swap a few heads, remove the head wear from some and also use figures from the Kallistra sword armed warrior set and the peasants pack.

I
have to say that in general I was quite happy with the end result here.
Apart from one or two glaring bad shield choices which I will in time
change, the final result is close to where I want to be.

Skirmishers:-

By this stage I had sorted shield designs and established sources
for most of the figures. I used a variety of troop types from a
selection of kallistra packs. Because I wanted some shield-less and
some to use smaller shields I decided to hand paint some shields . These
were a definite pick and mix and I really like the end result.

Using these methods I managed to achieve a real mix of figures and poses.

Next for some bow armed skirmishers. My thinking was that in this era, after the break down of central government, access to ex Roman weaponry and designs would have faded and so I decided that by now the bows would be straight bows rather than composite bows. I had a choice therefore of converting the Kallistra figures or looking elsewhere. I eventually found some quite nice Copplestone archers in their fantasy range that nicely fitted the bill with a little modification.

The main changes were to reshape the few helmets and do some minor changes to hair styles.

That about completes the story of the Romano-British infantry. I aim
to produce a few more using all that I have learned so far and maybe
replace some of the earlier efforts. However, I'm not displeased with
the end result and for me this "group" photo is close to where I want to
be.

The Journey through the Cavalry was very similar but that's another story.

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about me

I'm a happily retired veteran wargamer. We have lived here in Cataluña for some 30 odd years. I seldom have live opponents and am quite happy to game solo in all and every period or scale that takes my fancy